Update:

The fine folks at Bicycle Portraits have succesfully raised their first goal amount of $15,000!  Woohoo!

Don’t let those pledges stop though because they aren’t finished yet.  They still need to raise another $7,500 to get this project completed.  Head over to their new pledge site at kickstarter to contribute to a great art project today!

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Photography can be about many things.  Photography can be a record of time or culture, of the now, a still image that visually tells a story of what happened at one specific point, in one specific place, in history.  It can be about showing beauty, fear, hope, or change.  Photography can change lives.  Photography can pull people together.  Photography can show us an entirely different world, millions of miles away, and show us that we’re still, at the core, so much alike.  Photography can be so human.

Two Photographers, One Project

Stan Engelbrecht (Cape Town, South Africa) and Nic Grobler (Johannesburg, South Africa) have joined forces to create Bicycle Portraits and are looking for your help!

They’re photographing commuters and other cyclists in South Africa in a project project that is an investigation into the South African bicycle culture.

It’s a compelling project with some truly wonderful photography.

The portraits show a diverse people who come from all walks of life and use their bikes for various reasons.

Stan and Nic are working towards putting this project into book format and are looking for pledges to complete their wonderful photography project.

Through publishing this book, we want to be able to assist the underprivileged cycling community through our project – be it teaching bicycle maintenance skills, providing necessities like helmets, tires, tubes, locks… It would be great to create a support structure for the people who appear in the book – this could be a trust funded by a percentage from sales of the cover price, or a charity set up in the name of the people who appear in the book etc. Ultimately we want to promote cycling as a means of independent transport to empower the underprivileged, and in fact, to encourage everyone capable to ride a bike as an alternative to driving a car, or even using public transport. We hope that this will lead to the kind of infrastructure development that is designed with all people in mind, not just cars. – Stan and Nic

Stan and Nic are using Kickstarter to collect pledges and their project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Thursday Jun 17, 3:00pm EDT.  You can donate as little as $1 but a pledge of $50 or more will get you pre-ordered for the book.  Take a look and make a pledge!